Wednesday, May 6, 2009

close encounters: BiGFooT

this past weekend my parents & sisters and i headed down to old washington, ohio (barely a dot on the map) to celebrate my sister Hannah's 13th birthday. for her birthday hannah wanted to go horse-back riding, so my mom found this totally random remote place 2.5 hours away that offered trail-rides pretty cheap. (The horseriding adventure is a story in and of itself...) We stayed in a cabin for the night at Salt Fork State Park... and when we went to the lodge there to check in, we discovered that we had unknowingly managed to get a reservation for a cabin during the most anticipated weekend of the year at Salt Fork State Park Lodge in the middle of Ohio... The 21st Annual International Bigfoot Conference!

The lodge was packed with BigFoot extremists, all in their element... you could tell they were all very excited to have found their niche, crazies united together, almost like a support group. The conference had many speakers who spoke of their first hand encounters with the alleged creatures as well as many researchers who presented their evidence, cast footprints, weird hair samples, pieces of bone, etc. The conference room spilled out into the hallways with ear & eye strained believers and curious spectators. We decided to join them on a 30 car caravan out to one of the alleged encounter sites. (they used the word "alleged" alot considering that nothing has ever been "proven".) Don Keating, renowned Ohio Bigfoot Researcher & documentarian, led the group to a picnic table in a field where an unsuspecting couple of picnickers had once seen a large hairy creature in the woods that freaked their dog out. We walked into the tree line where the creature was supposedly seen, and our tour group was delighted to have found what appeared to be a giant footprint in the mud. Don Keating instructed everyone to ignore the footprint, stating that people in the area aware of the BigFoot convention found satisfaction in pranking the researchers with fake footprints. The tour group did not find the prank amusing...

here is a picture of one of the most recent original authentic prints found by a family a picnickers in the same area that we went to check out with the convention goers. The family had outlined the print in ketchup...

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